Posts

Showing posts from 2023

How and why I read my apartment energy usage?

Let's start with why I have no good answer other than that I want to. It's 99% for fun, since I live in an apartment with district heating and good insulation, and the energy consumption does not really correlate with heating or cooling. Energy usage is tied mostly to cooking, the dishwasher and other appliances that we use consciously. I just want to get the wattage into Home Assistant in a way I can understand and/or manage myself. But how do you measure it? That's been quite the journey. The go-to way of reading the energy usage (here in Norway at least) is using a device that plugs into the HAN-port in the fuse box, and Wifi. Tibber Pulse is a good example of this. My problem with this is that my HAN-port is in the basement, four concrete stories below my apartment, way out of reach of my Wifi.  There are HAN-devices that work over ZigBee, and I did contemplate sneakily replacing lightbulbs down the stairwell with ZigBee-bulbs, to extend my ZigBee-network all the way d

Getting Company Portal apps locally using PowerShell (no auth!)

Image
As you may know, I work at Intility in the application packaging space.  I've been doing that since about 2015, and during that time I and my collegaues have developed standards and systems to help us package apps better and faster. The so far last and unifying system is AppPackBot, which you can read more about at Intility Engineering . I won't (and quite frankly can't) go into all the nuts and bolts beyond what that blog post says, but I wanted to share something. You see, there are mainly two "app stores" in a corporate Windows environment. Good old Software Center, and the new Company Portal. Software Center can be programmatically interacted with using the CCM_Application WMI Class . But Company Portal, not so much.  I burst out laughing when I read this attempt to install an app from Company Portal using PowerShell. Tldr: Using the companyportal: protocol to open Company Portal with a given app guid, and then sending a ctrl+i keystroke that equals clicking